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News on TiVo, "God's Machine"
Brace for incoming TiVo news!
rtphokie pointed out that FCC chair Michael Powell got a TiVo for Christmas and calls it
"God's machine."
Powell also said he wanted to share TV shows with his sister -- but he might have to violate the DMCA to do it: TiVo wants to
join the home network
(thanks Insomniac), but parr pointed us to
TiVo's Thursday press release
in which they assure us that "every TiVo Series2 DVR contains a unique public/private key pair," so only "designated" units within your home can share programs, you "cannot send content outside the home," and transfers over your home network will be encrypted (no sniffing!). Meanwhile, on the WB (part of AOL-TW), everything old is new again, as producers and advertisers work to create a live variety show with
built-in commercials (free reg. req.) (thanks eternal_software).
And if you missed our earlier TiVoesque stories, check 'em out:
TiVo-radio wanted,
HDTV TiVo,
and
TiVo Rendezvous. Whew!
Um...which article in here, exactly, says that Powell wants to share programs with his sister but that he is aware he would need to break the DMCA to do it?
The sentence construction in the original posting suggests that Powell is actually aware of the law and its problems, and neither the article nor anything he as ever said proves any such thing.
Yes, it's semantics, but it's damn important semantics. One is playing what-if games where we say 'Gee, wouldn't it be k-rad cool if Michael Powell was breakin' the law, huhhuhuhuh?', the other makes a _clear-cut statement_ that an appointed government official is aware of the problems of a copyright law his department nor administration never gave a nod to.
Ha.
The post should read, 'Powell also said that he wanted to share shows with his sister. What Powell may not be aware of is that in saying so, he may ultimately have to break the DMCA to do it.'
"So TiVo is going out of it's way to assure it's customers that the device has been purposely and explicitely designed so as to be less useful to them. What the fuck is going on here?????"
I'd say they're covering their asses to make sure they can stay in business. They know that the hackers can figure out ways to extract video from it and send it wherever they please. As long as they stay on the good side of the DMCA/copyright law/whatever they won't have to deal with 500lb media gorillas flinging feces at them. Can you blame them? I'd much rather find a hack on the internet to extract/share video than risk having my Tivo go lifeless because of lawsuits.
(Although I've heard there's a 'plan B' if Tivo does go under...)
The media industry is already making the move into product placement as the means to make money. We've seen it in movies for years, but most TV shows and music have avoided it due to commercial sponsorship. The industrty realizes we can make digital recordings and edit out the commercials, so why not embed the commercials in the shows themselves. It's only a matter of time before Pepsi's new ad campaign involves their name being mentioned in 8 of the Top Ten songs on the radio....plus your still stuck with the advertizing if you buy the CD, or just "steal" it off the internet. Could be a good thing for the file swappers if they can now argue that the artist was paid by the advertizers
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
While most of what you say is very true, this is only a problem if viewed with eyes that are unready to change the business model from the ground up (which admittely includes just about the entire media industry).
If shows could be entirely paid for by embedded advertisements, then the business model the distribution of the shows would have to be different. Firstly, the producers would want to have as many viewers as possible, spreading over the Internet would be greatly encouraged. Secondly , while it is true that there would be no reason for syndicated channels to pay for the material if they cannot tack on their own advertisements, the original sponsors and producers, again looking for as many viewers as possible, would want the shows syndicated. So the business relationship would be inverse: producers would pay channels to show there shows.
The question that remains, of course, is that of the efficiency of the adveritising. It is obvious that if an advertisement in embedded in the program instead of tacked on, it will be less flexible both geographically and temporally (difficult to change for different markets, as well as for different times), meaning that advertisers are less likely to pay as much as they do today per viewer of the add. But there are several things that help moderate this. Firstly, brands and products are much more global today then when television started - there is probably no shortage of companies that are willing to market there product at every viewer of Friends (or whatever mind numbing sitcom we are being spoon fed this week). Secondly, a loss in advertising revenue does not necessarily mean the end of TV - there are what, five?, different Discovery channels in cable packages these days, will it really be the end of the world if they were forced to scale that back to one or two? Television has become much more efficient in just the last ten years or so - it is now possible to produce material for much less per possible viewer then it was previously.
Writing off the concept of embedded advertisements is premature. The nature of the information age (barring the bonds that MS and co. want to place on it) is that people are in control, down to the micro level, of what content they consume. In the long term, it is not possible in such a society to try to make people pay attention to things they do not desire - making it seem to them that they do desire it is advertisements only hope.
Two things. First of all no one is forcing you. Second of all 600$ is dirt cheap. There are som 178 episodes (not counting all the extra stuff, like behind the scenes) of TNG. That is about 3 bucks per episode. If you can't afford that, you either live in Afghanistan or you are simply to cheap to buy, no matter what they were charged.
I sincerely doubt it. At
Some people will not be satisfied before you can get it for free. And then they will probably bitch because the download is too slow.
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